Penelope March Is Melting

by Jeffrey Michael Ruby

  After a trip back through the kaleidoscope tunnel, onto the corkscrewing slides that somehow launched them upward as though gravity were working in reverse, and then another white-knuckle screamfest in the iceslidevator, the three of them were back in Buzzardstock’s gallery. But to Penelope, everything felt different.

  Around that time, strange things began to happen in Glacier Cove.

  First, scores of residents reported seeing bizarre, jellyfish-like clouds in the sky. The town’s UFO believers went bonkers, swearing they had heard a strange language coming from each cloud.

  GC Academy’s science teacher explained that the cloud phenomenon was called virga. “It happens when ice crystals in clouds fall but evaporate before hitting the ground,” he said. “It’s pretty rare around here, but it’s possible the same thing happens in space. So maybe the kooks are on to something.”

  A construction worker named Leonard Pogue reported an avalanche on the north side when he came home from work to find a seventy-foot mountain of snow where his house once stood. A shrewd man, Pogue built an enormous igloo and opened Pogue’s Cone Zone, a successful snow-cone stand. So the Pogues managed just fine, thank you very much.

  Then there was that business at the GC Municipal Jail. When none of the twenty-four prisoners appeared at breakfast one morning, guards rushed to the prisoners’ cells and found two surprises. The first was that the inmates were gone. The second was that all twenty-four cells were flooded knee-deep with stagnant water pouring in through a gap where the wall met the floor.

  “The adverse weather must have caused the prison’s eastern wall to erode at the base, which provided the inmates in cell block nine just enough space to squeeze under,” the warden told a reporter from the Daily Icicle. “They swam to freedom. That’s the only possibility. Trust me, these chowderheads weren’t smart enough to escape on their own.”

  Next, the crabeater seals disappeared from the zoo. Echoing the prison escape, the seals swam from their enclosure and never looked back. The prison was on the west side of town, and the escapees went east. The zoo was on the east side, and the seals traveled west. Periodically, an escaped prisoner would pass an escaped seal, and each would nod quietly at the other and keep moving so as not to arouse suspicion.

  It must be reported here that the residents did not seem terribly troubled by these occurrences. Quite the opposite, actually. As the sun emerged from behind its usual wall of clouds and the town thawed, so did people’s cautions. Instead of fretting over, say, the fact that McCallister’s Butcher Shop was under three feet of water, and the sausages that poor McCallister had been curing since Lord Knows When were now floating around the shop like delicious but doomed canoes, Glacier Covians were flinging off their clothes and jumping, pasty white skin and all, into the many small lakes now populating the landscape. The whole town was outside. School was canceled for a day, if only because the superintendent didn’t know what else to do.

  Most everyone assumed these were odd coincidences, the kind of things that just happen, but Penelope knew. The water drip-drip-dripping from icicles, the giant puddles forming everywhere, the periodic pop and sizzle rumbling underground. It all added up to one undeniable fact that no one else would acknowledge.

  Glacier Cove was melting.

  Penelope’s concern for her brother doubled. He seemed to be melting too. Not actually melting, of course, but since the accident and the experience at Buzzardstock’s, he’d grown more withdrawn and morose. His smile had been replaced with a dead-eyed look that chilled Penelope to the core.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked him one day.

  “About what?”

  “The Shard. Glacier Cove. You.”

  Miles scoffed. “Jeez, stop with the drama.”

  “Wait. You don’t believe Buzzardstock?”

  “Come on, Pen. The old man is crazier than a cross-eyed caribou.”

  Again, Penelope heard Stella Wanamaker’s raspy voice: A stranger has entered your life. Do not trust this stranger.

  “Sure, Ore9n’s a little odd,” Penelope said. “But he doesn’t seem crazy.”

  “Which makes more sense? That an ancient shape-shifting sea goddess snuck under his house to steal a magic crystal so she could melt the town or that Buzzardstock is a creepy old man with a chain saw and too much time on his hands?”

  “But…why would he make it all up?”

  “I don’t know,” Miles said. “Maybe he enjoys scaring kids.”

  “What about, you know…what you saw underwater? Was that real?”

  “I don’t know what it was. Look, you’re the only person I care about in this whole town. Dad, sometimes. And I’m telling you. Stay away from Ore9n Buzzardstock. The man is going to do nothing but get us into trouble.”

  Penelope had always assumed that her brother liked trouble.

  What she didn’t know was that Miles had been having horrible nightmares since he’d eaten Buzzardstock’s dream cookie. It started with the usual stuff. He dreamed he was late for school and couldn’t find his classroom, or he was falling into an endless black hole. But then the dreams got worse. He was trapped in a dark closet, the walls closing in until they threatened to crush him, or his teeth crumbled in his mouth and sifted to the ground in a fine powder.

  Each dream plunged his mind into a gloomy netherworld that cut deep into his fears. When the nightmares assumed no definable shape beyond the same raw terror he’d felt under Lake Trenchfoot, Miles began to dread the night altogether. He tried to just ignore the problem and hope it went away. As with any problem larger than a headache, it didn’t. So Miles downed a few cups of his father’s turnip coffee in hopes of keeping awake. When that didn’t work, he pinched his skin. Eventually, his eyes grew heavy and he dozed off, and the whole thing started over.

  Miles had lost so much weight that he poked four new holes on his belt with a pen, and the fantastical visions that haunted his dreams spilled over into his waking hours. In Escapology Club, he felt something wiggling in his straitjacket and thought he saw a big hairy spider—No! Two spiders!—scurrying up his neck. He nearly tore the straitjacket apart trying to get out.

  The other member of the Escapology Club quit after that. “Man, Miles has been weird since he fell through that ice,” he told another kid. “I think he’s losing it.”

  “I’d say he lost it,” said the other kid.

  The final straw came during math class, when Miles saw the chalkboard open up and a tidal wave of frigid saltwater gush out. He screamed until the water filled his lungs; then he closed his eyes and gave in to the rush of water. When he opened them, the water was gone and his classmates were working on a math problem on the chalkboard. And Miles was sitting at his desk, bone dry and coughing.

  He had spent much of the past few months escaping from chains and boxes, but he had no idea how to wiggle his way out of this torture. He had to do something. Only two solutions made any sense. One was to never sleep again. The other was even scarier.

  —

  Miles poked his head in the creaky door of Wanamaker’s Fortune-Telling Emporium. From across the room, Stella Wanamaker saw the terrified-looking boy in her doorway.

  “Come, come,” she said. “Or go, go. You’re letting the cold air in.”

  Vaguely nauseated by the smell of wax and bird feathers, Miles took a tentative step inside. The door closed behind him with a dull thud. “Hi,” he said, trying to sound chipper. “I’m—”

  “Silence.” The old lady approached him. “Do not say a thing. Who you are. Why you’re here. Your problem. I will find problem. Remove your coat.” She put her cold hand on his back, sharp fingernails digging into his shoulder. “Would you like a cup of schlerguth? Good for digestion.”

  Miles shook his head. He didn’t know what schlerguth was—some kind of gross tea, maybe—but he was fairly certain that he did not want it. The bird squawked from the corner, as if to say Good call. Avoid the schlerguth.

  Stella ushered Miles to a wobb
ly table, nudged him into an unstable chair, and reached behind the counter to grab her candles and bowl. “Many ways to tell fortune,” she said. “All rubbish, for fools and by fools. Except one. Place candles in bowl.”

  Miles took the candles, one red and one black, and stood them in the brass bowl. Stella watched closely with her one good eye and almost smiled. She took the bowl and placed it on an oven burner.

  A flame immediately shot out of the bowl—one giant, angry flare that seemed to cut the air over the stove in half. Then it disappeared so quickly Miles wasn’t even sure it was real.

  It was real. Stella jumped back, the fire just missing her cheek. But it had not missed her completely—it had seared off her tarantula eyebrows. The stench of burning hair lent an extra layer of ick to the room.

  Unfazed, Stella peered back into the bowl. Without eyebrows, her face appeared to be in a constant state of surprise. “Come closer,” she said.

  Miles got up from the table. He considered running out the door; instead he teetered to the stove. In the bowl, the candles had burned down to one goopy layer of purple.

  “Tell me, child, what do you see?”

  “Wax.”

  “Look harder.”

  “But I’m not a fortune-teller.”

  Stella clucked her tongue. “You see more of the future than I.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because”—she pointed at the stove—“I did not even turn on the burner yet. So tell me. What do you see?”

  Miles felt a weird quiver. He studied the wax and then closed his eyes. A series of images appeared, each quick and sharp. Some were fuzzy, as if viewed through a screen door, others clear as water. A cookie…a pile of broken pencils…a ticking watch…three penguins who almost seemed to be smiling…a submarine…bowls stacked in a cupboard…a volcano…flapping orange tubeworms on the side of a mountain…an icy tire swing hanging from a tree…Stella Wanamaker laughing—

  Disoriented, Miles’s eyes shot open. The wax in the bowl had hardened, and so had his confusion. Now he had Stella Wanamaker smiling at him curiously.

  “Tell me. What promises does your future make?”

  Miles backed away. “I gotta go.”

  “What is your name, child?”

  Miles grabbed his coat.

  “Stop,” Stella said.

  Miles did not stop. Before he could even get his coat on, he was out the door and running down the street, more horrified than before.

  “Forget payment!” Stella’s laughing voice called after him. “Pay you, I should!”

  While the ginger-toned sun cast a heavy shade over the west side, Penelope trudged across the tundra’s slushy slopes and ever-widening crevasses. At one point, a fugitive crabeater seal slid past her on the icy sidewalk, covering its sheepish face with a fin.

  Penelope’s destination was the Grotto, a hidden cave accessible to anyone small enough to squeeze through the small jagged opening on the side of an ice peak. Kids had turned it into a clubhouse of sorts; Penelope heard that high schoolers used the space on weekends for turnip-beer keg parties. After a lengthy search, she found the opening and shimmied inside.

  As she stomped and shook the ice off herself, Penelope’s eyes adjusted to the dim light. Then all at once she stopped. Her blood didn’t just go cold. It stopped pumping through her veins entirely.

  Someone was standing in the corner.

  “Who’s there?” Penelope’s voice echoed off the rocky walls.

  The body stepped into the light, or what little light had filtered into the cave. Before Penelope could even make out the face, she saw the black clothes and knew. It was Coral Wanamaker.

  “Jeez, Coral! You scared me! What are you doing?”

  Coral considered the question and jammed her hands in her pockets. “Followed you.”

  “But you got here before I did.”

  Coral made a face that could have qualified as a smile or a grimace or even an itchy nose, and the girls sank into an awkward silence. The only noise came from a petrel scavenging for food, its yellow bird feet scritch-scritch-scritching against the ice. Coral spied a deck of cards on the ice coffee table. “Wanna play gin rummy?”

  The two girls sat on the makeshift ice couch, their feet on the coffee table. As they played cards, shadows from a crackling bonfire flashed on the sky-high ceiling. The petrel lay on its belly at their feet like a dog too lazy to go outside.

  “Why did you take the job at Buzzardstock’s?” Penelope asked.

  Coral looked away. “Honestly? To get out of my house. Stella’s a little hard to be around right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s becoming…oh, I don’t know. Can we talk about literally anything else?”

  “Fine. Do you believe Buzzardstock’s story?”

  Coral seemed equally uncomfortable with this subject. She put down her cards to bite her thumbnail. “Which part?”

  “The whole thing.”

  “You first,” said Coral.

  “I asked you first.”

  “So?”

  Penelope thought for a moment. “What if we both write it down on a piece of paper, like a secret ballot, and then we hand our ballot to each other at the same time?”

  “That’s fair.”

  Penelope reached into her backpack for two pencils and tore off two scraps of paper. She handed one to Coral. A moment later, each girl had folded her paper and placed it on the coffee table. But just as they were reaching for the scraps, the petrel nabbed both wads in its beak and flew out through the Grotto’s opening.

  The girls laughed so hard their glee bounced off the walls of the cave, until it sounded like an entire auditorium of children laughing. Soon they forgot Buzzardstock and made their way back to town.

  The bird didn’t make it far before spitting out its meal. If, through some weird twist of events, someone had happened to be standing outside the Grotto at the exact moment the petrel came shooting out, he would have seen its body twist in midair and expand into something purple and repulsive, full of teeth and tentacles and oozing sores, before morphing into a small fish and plopping into the water. If that person had not been puzzled and petrified by such a sight and decided to descend into a deep crevasse twenty yards from the opening of the Grotto, he would’ve found two wadded-up scraps of paper. On one scrap, he would find three mysterious words written in loopy cursive:

  I believe him.

  The other would be blank.

  —

  That night, long after Miles had thrashed his way into a troubled sleep, Penelope hopped from her hammock to get a drink of water. She tiptoed across the floor, trying to avoid the creaky floorboards, and peeked into the kitchen.

  Her father sat at his usual spot with his usual glass, his back to Penelope. A nearly empty bottle was on the table in front of him.

  As if sensing her presence, her father turned around. “What’re you doing up?” he slurred. His eyes were bloodshot, his face a mess.

  “I’ll go back to bed,” Penelope said quickly.

  “No,” he said, patting the empty chair beside him. “Sit down.”

  Penelope sized up the situation. A photo album sat on his lap, a big brown leather book that had been perused so often the pictures were falling out. She didn’t like to be around her father when he was drinking, but he looked so lonely.

  In fairness, Russell March could be a gentleman and a gentle man. When the kids were little, he used to sing them to sleep with made-up lullabies: “Geese and ducks and owls and parrots / eat bugs and twigs and moldy carrots / and sing with cows and naked sheep / and fall into a slumber deep….” At some point the lullabies stopped, but more than once, Penelope woke to find her father caressing her hair with his coarse fingers and with a bittersweet smile on his face. It was the best feeling on earth. Those were the good nights.

  Penelope sat down and they flipped through the album, perusing the faces of old family members. Large groups of grim-faced ancestors pos
ing in thick wool coats in a dusty parlor. A delighted toddler on shaky legs with her arms wrapped around an unopened present. A ruddy-faced man on a rickety ladder cleaning out the gutters of an old house.

  “Is it true that Uncle Murph had eleven toes?” Penelope asked.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Miles swears it’s true.”

  “Uncle Murph did not have eleven toes.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Uncle Murph had twelve toes.”

  They came to a photo of a beautiful, delicate woman with brown eyes and dark wavy hair. She was sitting cross-legged on the snowy roof of a car that had been laid out with a picnic, her face frozen in a crooked smile radiating love and mischief and a vague sadness.

  Penelope had seen this photo before, and every time she saw it, the crooked smile hurt a little more. It was as though this woman—who Penelope knew to be her mother even though her father would never say so—could read what was in Penelope’s heart and liked what she found there, but was also somehow disappointed.

  The two of them stared at it, studying her smile and thinking how easily life could have been different. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to speak.

  For a quick moment, Penelope wanted to tell her father about Buzzardstock and Makara Nyx and the Shard. She wanted to tell him how scared she was. She wanted to tell him she knew she was different from everyone else and felt a constant, nagging ache for something she could not identify. But she didn’t know where to begin.

  The moment passed. Her father flashed a halfhearted grin and closed the book. “C’mon,” he said in a hollow voice, patting Penelope’s leg with as much rough tenderness as he could muster. “I’ll tuck you in.”

  After a brief burst of goodwill due to the Lake Trenchfoot rescue, Penelope found many of her classmates even crueler than before.

  Many of the taunts now revolved around Mr. Stingleberry, who could not hide his gushy awe at Penelope’s ingenuity on Lake Trenchfoot. He made a big embarrassing deal of calling on her constantly, even when she didn’t have her hand up. Once, he brought a camera and asked a kid to take a picture of him and Penelope for his daughter. The others, of course, jumped on that delicious opportunity.